fact

All
dispatches
essays
reviews
columns
C. E. COUGHLAN
Dog Show Dancing

The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.

Andrea G. Johnston
The Fallen Man

It’s dark when I get off the bus by the corner store. Not the best area of town. The only other person in sight is lying on the sidewalk.

S. Taylor
Wet Dragonflies

When I met you, one floor up from the acute psychosis ward, you were wearing a paper shower cap and green pyjamas just like mine. You glared at me through the crowd because you thought I had your hoodie on. But we just had very similar hoodies.

Craig Taylor
Karaoke at the Lantzville

This was the first pub I entered when I finally said goodbye to vomiting on local beaches because I could drink legally. And it’s the first pub I’ve come to since I’ve been home. Now it’s Tuesday night, Karaoke Night.

Bill MacDonald
An Ounce of Civet

Dinner with James Reaney—poet, playwright, professor—who is mistaken by a pair of Irish ladies for “that decadent writer Mordecai Richler.”

Craig Taylor
Punch

It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.

Stephen Henighan
Separate Crossings

Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.

DAVID COLLIER
Happy Hearts

A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.

Daniel Francis
The Landscape Men

The Group of Seven “vision” is an inadequate way to describe an urban, multiracial, industrial society like Canada, and pretty much always was.

George Fetherling
City of Neighbourhoods

In Bangkok as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours.

Stephen Henighan
Before Lonely Planet

Lonely Planet readers no longer travel in Bolivia or Thailand, but within the elastic, infinitely portable boundaries of the Lonely Planet nation.

Daniel Francis
At the Margins

In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.

Stephen Osborne
Signs and Portents

Mr. C.F. Keiss, awealthy American visitor from Bucyrus, Ohio, met death with “tragic suddenness”under the wheels of the new City auto ambulance at the corner of Pender andGranville Streets yesterday afternoon.

Norbert Ruebsaat
Horror Show

When we hitchhiked back to Castle­gar it was dark and the lights on the car dashboards flickered and their glass reflected the faces of the men who’d picked us up and who, I imagined, knew everything there was to know about electricity.

Alberto Manguel
In Memoriam: Mahmoud Darwish

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Mary Vallis
Rec Room Afterlife

Not long ago on a sticky Saturday night at a comedy club in Madison, Wisconsin, the funeral director with whom I was having a drink told me how long it takes for the formaldehyde to replace the blood in a dead person’s arteries. He drank a light beer

Andrea G. Johnston
Parley

At the Tim Hortons on Young Street in Halifax, a man clears his throat, a rough-looking older guy in the back corner, staring out the window. One knee, angled out from the table, jigs up and down; the rest of him is quite still. A sheet of notepaper

George Fetherling
The Definite Article

The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.

Michał Kozłowski
Wild World

One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected ­butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.

Jane Silcott
Gangly Man

I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.

Deborah Ostrovsky
Window Booth at Rapido

A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.

Gillian Wigmore
CBC Shows an Interest in the Pine Beetle Epidemic

The National calls from the cbc in Toronto. They want me to be their “eyes on the ground.” I try not to laugh—I’m a part-time poet who lives in the suburbs. The woman on the phone asks what it’s like to live in a city in a forest. Does she mean here? In Toronto, she explains, that’s how they described it to her. She must be picturing deep woods with houses and corner stores tucked in among the paths, and roads more like wagon trails. When I drive past Winners and Costco I don’t think “forest.” No, I tell her, Prince George is a lot like the outskirts of Guelph. She falls silent and I amend it: Prince George is like Edmonton but planned by drunken loggers. She seems to like that better, so I carry on: it’s like living in a logging camp but with easier access to big box stores. What about the trees, she asks. Oh, they’re fine, I say, just shorter and mostly gone.

Stephen Osborne
Julia’s World

I went to the babysitter’s to pick up Julia, who was two and a half years old, and she said that she had been “a little bit sad for a while” because her mother, who had a new part-time job and had dropped Julia off a few hours earlier, had gone away for “quite a long time.”

Stephen Osborne
Lions Gate

Not long ago, late on a Monday afternoon, a man with a camera clambered onto the railing of Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver in order to get a clear view of the sunset he wanted to take a picture of, and, on stretching his upper body toward the scene t

Sara Cassidy
Flying the Coop

You can’t break eggs without making an omelette.

Véronique Darwin
New Normal Board Games

Use the board games you unearthed during isolation to reinventclassic games for our times.

Stephen Osborne
Hospitals of the Mind

A few years ago, someone left a pocket-sized photo album on my desk with an unsigned note stuck on the cover that said I “might know what to do with it.” Inside, glued one to a page, are twenty-four photographs of Essondale, the mental hospital in N

Tiffany Hsieh
Church on Queen

Here they are our people.

Randy Fred
Resistance and Renewal

After hearing survivors’ stories, nothing can ever surprise me.

Celia Haig-Brown
Resistance and Relentlessness

The long road to decency and justice.

Rick Maddocks
The Other 9/11

Chileans remember when their government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

Carmen Tiampo
Wash With Like Colours

People have asked: What’s it like? How’s it been? Are you scared?

Patty Osborne
Underwire

"We got into Zellers through jewellery, purses and umbrellas, stockings and underwear and into brassieres, where our momentum deserted us. Now we were both in unfamiliar territory."

Myrna Garanis
World-Class Hotel

Poets trashed hotel rooms long before rock bands made it fashionable.

Stephen Osborne
Defining Moments

The Olympic Games left a trail of moments: a rare moment, a Canadian moment, a you moment, a me moment...

Sara Cassidy
Gravitass

A poetic tribute to men's rear-ends.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Meanwhile, in 1666

Aboard a stuck SkyTrain, reading Samuel Pepys's account of the Great Fire of London.

Robert Everett-Green
Licorice Roots

A writer uncovers a family connection with a sweet English confection.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Contact No Contact

Personal narratives by Indigenous and settler contributors describing significant first contacts that brought new insights.

Randy Fred
Seeing Things

When taking hallucinogenics, more is better, within limits.

Stephen Osborne
Reading in Summer

Where in the used bookstore would mysteries by Raymond Chandler be shelved—in Novels or in Fiction? Stephen Osborne remembers the summer pleasures of reading outdoors and used bookstores.

Marko Sijan
Peace on Earth

"My father believes the world is coming to an end, yet he commits his life to curing the sick." Dispatch by Marko Sijan.

Lucianne Poole
Chainsaw Man

A man with a chainsaw boarded the number 7 bus at about 7:45 a.m., when I was on my way to work in downtown Ottawa.

Kristen den Hartog
Solace

Bud was one of the few who’d seen Stewart’s face as it was.

Jeff Shucard
My Week in Tunisia

Enjoy the fresh kebab while your freshly dented fender gets fixed.

Jordyn Catalano
Goodbye and Good Luck

A COVID test in the city of a hundred steeples.

Hàn Fúsēn
Soy Alérgico

“Excuse me, are you the customer with the peanut allergy?”

Jonathan Montpetit
The Art of Shaving Oneself

In search of a unified self.

Andrea Routley
Thank You All For Coming

25 reasons to stop talking to my straight friend.

Christine Lai
Fact
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Gabrielle Marceau
Fact
Main Character

I always longed to be the falling woman—impelled by unruly passion, driven by beauty and desire, turned into stone, drowned in flowers.

Mia + Eric
Future Perfect

New bylaws for civic spaces.

JUDY LEBLANC
Walking in the Wound

It is racism, not race, that is a risk factor for dying of COVID-19.

SADIQA DE MEIJER
Do No Harm

Doing time is not a blank, suspended existence.

Kristen den Hartog
The Insulin Soldiers

It was as though a magic potion had brought him back to life.

Steven Heighton
Everything Turns Away

Going unnoticed must be the root sorrow for the broken.

DANIEL CANTY
The Sum of Lost Steps

On the curve of the contagion and on the measure of Montreality.

Brad Cran
Fact
Potluck Café

It took me a million miles to get here and half the time I was doing it in high heels.

Carellin Brooks
Ripple Effect

I am the only woman in the water. The rest of the swimmers are men or boys. One of them bobs his head near me, a surprising vision in green goggles, like an undocumented sea creature. I imagine us having sex, briefly, him rocking over me like a wave.

MARCELLO DI CINTIO
The Great Wall of Montreal

The chain-link fence along boulevard de l’Acadie— two metres high, with “appropriate hedge”—separates one of the wealthiest neighbourhoods in Montreal from one of the poorest.

Michał Kozłowski
New World Publisher

Randy Fred thought that life after residential school would be drinking, watching TV and dying. Instead, he became the "greatest blind Indian publisher in the world."

BRAD YUNG
Lessons I’m Going To Teach My Kids Too Late

"I want to buy a house. And build a secret room in it. And not tell the kids about it."

Paul Tough
City Still Breathing: Listening to the Weakerthans

I wasn’t certain whether I was in Winnipeg because of the Weakerthans, or whether I cared about the Weakerthans because I care about Winnipeg.

Stephen Osborne
This Postcard Life

Spiritual landscapes and unknowable people captured on film, used to convey a message.

Hilary M. V. Leathem
To Coronavirus, C: An Anthropological Abecedary

After Paul Muldoon and Raymond Williams.

Bill MacDonald
The Ghost of James Cawdor

A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923—conducted by Conan Doyle himself.

Ann Diamond
The Second Life of Kiril Kadiiski

He has been called the greatest Bulgarian poet of his generation. Can one literary scandal bury his whole career?

Caroline Adderson
Lives of the House

A basement shrine in her 1920s home inspires Caroline Adderson to discover the past lives of her house and its inhabitants.

Ivan Coyote
Shouldn’t I Feel Pretty?

Somewhere in the sweat and ache and muscle I carved a new shape for myself that made more sense.

David L. Chapman
Postcolonial Bodies

Mastery of the self

CONNIE KUHNS
There is a Wind that Never Dies

"If you are still alive, you must have had the experience of surrendering."

Sarah Leavitt
Small Dogs

Emily’s mother had unusually large eyes that bulged slightly and often turned red, and she stared at people in restaurants and stores. Sometimes Emily’s mother commented on these people’s conversations, or laughed at their jokes, as if she were part

Ola Szczecinska
Symbiosis in Warsaw

Ola Szczecinska returns to Warsaw to visit her grandmother, and to keep from losing her memories.

Jasmine Sealy
Small Victories

Jasmine Sealy on "You Can't Stay Here" by Jasmina Odor.

Stephen Osborne
Espresso Nerd Heaven

"My espresso machine was in the repair shop and I had begun to despair of ever seeing it again."

Rose Burkoff
Sun in Winter: A Toronto Wartime Journal 1942-1945

During World War II, Gunda Lambton and her two young children left England to live in Canada.

Patty Osborne
Barnacle Love

A review of Barnacle Love, a collection of short stories by Anthony De Sa.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Free to Be

Her story powers along; eventually she will arrive at the start, returning to the losses set down in the preface, losses so terrible we won’t mind if she chickens out.

RICHARD VAN CAMP
Friend in Need

Helen Garner’s novel "The Spare Room" opens in Melbourne as the protagonist and narrator, a middle-aged woman also named Helen (hmm), prepares for the visit of Nicola, her dear friend.

Kris Rothstein
The Native Heath

Stolen honeycombs, a fiancé training to be a missionary in Africa, a picnic marred by quicksand and fog, a fundraising party for pig pensions...

JILL MANDRAKE
Unabashed Drawing

"Drawing the Line: The How to Draw Book" is best suited for young artists who are interested in graphic novels or comic stories.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Notes on Navigation

"This Accident of Being Lost" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (House of Anansi) is a sharp collection of short stories and poetry that resists the colonialism of contemporary Canada.

Mandelbrot
Ordinary Bodies

Together the images in Bathers constitute a supreme study of ordinary bodies, and demonstrate in visceral ways just how unique is the ordinary body: no two alike, each an expression of itself.

Michael Hayward
Jack Kerouac, Francophone

Jack Kerouac, that prototypically “all-American” writer, was born to Québécois parents, and raised in the midst of an expatriate French-Canadian community in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts.

JILL MANDRAKE
Are You Smarter Than a Third Grader?

Published by The Writers' Exchange, “this book was created by Division 6, Mrs. Mehnert’s grade 3 class, at Thunderbird Elementary in the winter of 2014.”

roni-simunovic
VQFF 2017: Signature Move

Fawzia Mirza on the white, Western concept of coming out: "We have to let go of thinking that there’s one right way to be. It’s about finding better words and language to talk about the gay experience."

Patty Osborne
Better Late

A middle-aged man moves to a new city to restart his life, gets to know an old man named Oliver, and after only a few months realizes that he has fallen in love with both the new city and the old man.

Michael Hayward
Bookshop of the Heart

Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris regularly makes it onto lists like The World’s Coolest Bookstores and The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World.

Patty Osborne
Anti-Poverty Connection

In 1997, when Internet connections were dial-up and most of us were just trying to figure out how the World Wide Web worked, a group of people had the foresight to see that the Internet could be a powerful tool for the anti-poverty movement.

JILL MANDRAKE
Page's Pages

The poet and artist P.K. Page wrote Mexican Journal (Porcupine’s Quill) from 1960 to 1963, while posted in Mexico with her husband, Ambassador W. Arthur Irwin.

Patty Osborne
Flying Canoe

When I tried to describe the weird and wonderful book Accordéon by Kaie Kellough (ARP) to two Québécoise friends, I had to resort to reading a few excerpts because my own words failed me.

CONNIE KUHNS
The Ove Within

For Ove, the central character in the film A Man Called Ove there is nothing ahead but frustration, disappointment and sadness. “It’s just chaos when you’re not here,” he says to his newly departed wife as he lays flowers on her grave.

roni-simunovic
Middle-Aged Soft Rock Band

The first thing John K. Samson said when he and his band stepped onstage at the Commodore Ballroom on February 2 was, “Hi, we’re a middle-aged soft rock band from Winnipeg, Manitoba.”

Michael Hayward
Another Way of Saying Goodbye

Those who were close to the late John Berger have spoken of his generosity, praising Berger’s collaborative nature and his ability to establish and sustain creative friendships throughout a long and productive life.

JILL MANDRAKE
Seabrook Adventure

In The Abominable Mr. Seabrook, Joe Ollmann begins with a reflective preamble called “Me and Mr. Seabrook,” part of which reads, “I realized that no one knew about Seabrook’s work—all his books were out of print at the time…”

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Graphic Heroism

The One Hundred Nights of Hero by Isabel Greenberg (Doubleday Canada) is a beautifully illustrated graphic novel offering feminist adaptations of folk tales wrapped in an epic-feeling love story.

Thad McIlroy
I'm Sorry

In Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Doubleday) the main character Jude says “I’m sorry” over 100 times. And he adds in “I’m so sorry” 30 times.

Stephen Henighan
In Search of a Phrase

Phrase books are tools of cultural globalization—but they are also among its casualties.

Stephen Henighan
Collateral Damage

When building a nation, cultural riches can be lost.

Stephen Henighan
Transatlantic Fictions

Coming to harbour in a new world.

Alberto Manguel
Arms and Letters

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

CHERYL THOMPSON
Dismantling the Myth of the Hero

In a world dominated by heroes, difference is not tolerated.

Stephen Henighan
Reheated Races

Dividing and conquering local populations confines them to manageable administrative units.

Alberto Manguel
Achilles and the Lusitan Tortoise

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Stephen Henighan
All in the Same CANO

For a brief period the band CANO gave shape to the dream of a bilingual Canadian culture.

LISA BIRD-WILSON
Occupation Anxiety

Lisa Bird-Wilson on UNDRIP, reconciliation, and the anxiety felt by Indigenous people in Canada.

Stephen Henighan
Residential Roots

"The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system...Destroying Indigenous cultures was a positivist policy from Patagonia to Dawson City."

Stephen Henighan
Not Reading

What we do when we absorb words from a screen—and we haven’t yet evolved a verb for it—is not reading.

Alberto Manguel
Library as Wishful Thinking

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Stephen Henighan
Lethal Evolutions

Our society is formed on the assumption of a healthy immune system.

Stephen Henighan
Plague

What we can—and can’t—learn from the plague

Alberto Manguel
Léon Bloy and His Monogamous Reader

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Stephen Henighan
Confidence Woman

The woman who called herself Tatiana Aarons gave me an address that led to a vacant lot.

Stephen Henighan
A Pen Too Far

On March 5, 2006, a group of people gathered in a small Ontario city in the expectation of having books signed by an author who was not present.

George Fetherling
The Daily Apocalypse

The newspaper wars aren’t what they used to be.

Stephen Henighan
Taíno Tales

A package-deal paradise reputation curtails gringo knowledge of Dominican life.

Alberto Manguel
A Fairy Tale for Our Time

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel
Art and Blasphemy

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

Alberto Manguel
Literature & Morality

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

Stephen Henighan
Flight Shame

Without air travel, family networks might have dissolved long ago.

Alberto Manguel
The Defeat of Sherlock Holmes

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Michael Hayward
Getting past the past

Review of "A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past" by Lewis Hyde.

Daniel Francis
writing from an early grave

Review of "Orwell: The New Life" by D.J. Taylor.

Eimear Laffan
The Trap Door

This invertebrate does not go looking for prey

Michael Hayward
The peripatetic poet

Review of "Iron Curtain Journals," "South American Journals" and "Fall of America Journals" by Allen Ginsberg.

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Haunted House guest

Review of "A Guest in the House" by Emily Carroll.

Michael Hayward
Beyond the event horizon

Review of "Antkind" by Charlie Kaufman.

Anson Ching
Sailing the roaring forties

Review of "The Last Grain Race" by Eric Newby.

rob mclennan
Elizabeth Smart’s Rockcliffe Park

For the sake of the large romantic gesture

Michael Hayward
BELLE ÉPOQUE GOSSIP

Review of "The Man in the Red Coat" by Julian Barnes.

Peggy Thompson
More precious than rubies

Review of "Rubymusic" by Connie Kuhns.

Debby Reis
A not-totally-accurate introduction to the azores

Review of the Netflix series "Rabo de Peixe" (2023) created by Augusto de Fraga.

Michael Hayward
A Russian Brother and his sister

Review of "A Russian Sister" by Caroline Adderson.

Kris Rothstein
The messy back of history

Review of "My Grandfather’s Knife: Hidden Stories from the Second World War" by Joseph Pearson

Christine Lai
Now Must Say Goodbye

The postcard presents a series of absences—the nameless photographer,

the unknown writer and recipient; it is constituted by what is unknown

Sara de Waal
Little Women, Two Raccoons

Hit everything dead on, even if it’s big

Peggy Thompson
Have Mercy

Review of "Mercy Gene" by JD Derbyshire.

Michael Hayward
subterranean mysteries

Review of "Underland" by Robert Macfarlane.

Margaret Nowaczyk
Metanoias

The names we learn in childhood smell the sweetest to us

KELSEA O'CONNOR
Championing Trees

Review of "Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest" by Amanda Lewis.

Patty Osborne
Crossing Borders

Review of "Solito: A Memoir" by Javier Zamora

Michael Hayward
The Two Roberts

Review of "Turn Every Page" directed by Lizzie Gottlieb

Ian Roy
My Body Is a Wonderland

Maybe my doctor has two patients named Ian Roy, and I’ve been sent the other Ian’s file

Peggy Thompson
A moment with holden

Review of "Holden After & Before: Love Letter for a Son Lost to Overdose" by Tara McGuire.

JILL MANDRAKE
POINTS OF INFLECTION

Review of "Some of the Puzzles" by M.A.C. Farrant.

Michael Hayward
A HOLIDAY IN THE MOUNTAINS (WITH PIE)

Review of "Holiday, 1909" by Charles Chapman.